Born Wild (23 page)

I returned to more drip-feed disaster. George was in hospital again and our beloved Kenya was in a truly pitiful condition. It was the repetitiveness that was so draining: the same mistakes were made over and over again. It was hard to believe even then that Kenya's death throes could be so prolonged. Government appointments and jobs in the police and civil service were being bought and sold like doormen's positions at luxury hotels. Under Jomo Kenyatta corruption had been rife but under his successor Daniel arap Moi it had become institutionalized: citizenship cost $3,000; vehicle inspection cost $10; the police charged ‘customers' for the privilege of recording a crime. The country was falling apart. Businesses, like security companies, rubbish removers and generator suppliers, made money from citizens who had to pay for what was no longer provided by the state.

In the summer of 1987 the harassment campaign against us moved up another notch. I had been identified as George's heir and ‘they' wanted to abolish the monarchy. The campaign was managed by a senior cop in Hola, the district town two hundred miles down the Tana. To this day, I don't know who was pulling
his strings but it was apparent from the very beginning that he had backing from on high. President Moi himself had told the owners of the nearby farm Galana that they had to leave because it was politically impossible for Europeans to own that much land, however fairly they had acquired it. The European researchers had been turfed out of Wenji months ago and people proselytizing in Garissa too. I should have seen it coming but I was busy with the leopards, maintaining the camps and trying to protect George from visitors. My role had slowly evolved into one of keeping everything safe and working, and making the decisions that needed to be made – a role I still play today. Back then, I lost sight of the wider picture and didn't realize we were the only ones left until it was too late.

I was regularly ordered to drive the eight hours through bandit country to Hola to show my documents and permits to the police. In August 1987, on one particularly unpleasant occasion, I was charged with the fantastic crime of dealing in wild animals and running a tourist camp without a permit. If it hadn't been such a nightmare it would have been laughable: my entire life was devoted to the conservation of animals and I lived in a snakeinfested cage with a leopard that wouldn't even let my girlfriend near me, let alone a tourist. I had no option but to plead guilty and pay the two-hundred-dollar fine. To do otherwise would have meant staying in prison for a month awaiting trial and then more months of deferred court cases. Even I wasn't that bloodyminded.

I felt as if everyone except George wanted me out of Kora – even my old allies, the police. After seventeen years in Kora, protecting it from herders, poachers, then bandits, I had been defeated by a shadowy enemy I still cannot identify. Everyone I spoke to had a theory about who wanted control of the area – cattle barons from Somalia, Somali citizens of Kenya, Rift Valley politicians. At that time there were so many people lining up at
the trough that it was impossible to differentiate one from another, particularly when the end result was the same.

On 2 September Ted Goss flew up in his donated helicopter and explained to George again that I had to go. Ted had been warden of Meru for many years but had now assumed a consultancy role whereby he was the free airborne conduit to and from the director of the Wildlife Department. Ted said he had had no official word but unofficially had been told that Hola Council wanted no
mzungus
(foreigners) left in Kora; they would wait for George to die but the rest had to go. That way they would be able to do what they wanted with the reserve. The department, he said, was still hoping to protect the reserve and, indeed, raise its status to that of a national park. He insisted that I had to prepare to leave immediately or things would get even nastier. Ted was a good man whom I understand much better now but we clashed at times as I felt he failed to stick up for or support George as much as he should have done. Maybe I was asking too much, but he was a Kora trustee and I thought he should have represented us to government; too often it was the other way around.

That afternoon we started dismantling Kampi ya Chui as Bugsy and Squeaks looked on. They seemed perturbed as we started taking down the cement-covered hessian walls, packing up the holding compounds that I had built with the help of the Scots Guards and dismantling the swing that the younger leopards had so enjoyed playing on. The baboons on the rocks above us stared down triumphantly from their roosting place, their snouts crinkling to display their yellow teeth. I felt like shooting the whole lot of them.

Later I drove to Poacher's Rock where the old radio-repeater had been positioned until we were forced to pull it down. Shora's radio in Asako had also been confiscated so we could no longer hear and be warned about ambushes and trouble. I climbed to the top of the rock: there was no rain and no animals. It wasn't
until then that it hit me I was really going to have to leave. We had always ignored setbacks in the past and hoped for the best, but this was something I couldn't dodge. Lyndon B.Johnson said of Vietnam that he felt ‘like a hitchhiker on a Texas highway in a hail storm. I can't run, I can't hide and I can't make it stop.' I knew what he meant. I was heavy-hearted and desperately sad. And, as realization dawned, I became increasingly scared. I didn't want to go to Tanzania and I didn't want to leave the Old Man. What was I going to do?

The only option was to try to put all the bad things to one side and get on. Kora remained bursting with domestic stock throughout the rest of the year; there was nothing we could do about it and nothing the government would do about it. I spent a lot of time travelling up and down to Nairobi, trying to find help for George with the few authorities that were still willing to do anything, but in the climate of the time everybody's hands were tied. Even Richard Leakey's brother, Phil, who was assistant minister for tourism and wildlife, admitted there was nothing he could do. As he had known George for years I felt he was telling the truth. Phil had even lent a car to Ace and John when they had first brought Christian out and I'm sure he would have helped George if he could.

The police from Hola were taking no chances that I might renege on my decision to leave and kept the pressure on continuously. Over the next two months we had many visits from various people coming to see our firearms licences, radio licences and work permits. Given that we were five hours' drive from the nearest police station, this was attention of the most dedicated sort. In the way that things happen in Kenya, these visits usually ended with the police officers asking if they could have some petrol so they could get back to town. Oh, how I missed the days of Philip Kilonzo in Garissa, but we had lost touch after his transfer to Nairobi and I'd stupidly let slip my relations with his successors.

There was so much domestic stock around that we were terrified one of the lions or leopards would cause an incident. Thousands of cattle were being grazed in the immediate environs of the two camps. In October George went to see Perez Olindo at the WCMD and begged him to enforce the law by pushing out the stock. Perez promised George that as long as he was director not one Somali would be allowed in Kora. A few days later Ted Goss flew in and said that the Somalis would be pushed out with helicopters. The entire thing was madness: everyone knew that nothing was going to happen but Ted and Perez were obliged to say the opposite. Soon after, the researchers in the old Royal Geographical Society camp left, having completed what they had come to do, and we were definitively the last
mzungus
left on the Tana. We couldn't concentrate on our work at all. It was just a matter of hanging on for as long as possible, helping George plan for his future. As long as they were after me with such energy, I figured it meant that George would be left alone. But I wasn't as sure as I made out.

On 19 October, Bugsy walked calmly out of Kampi ya Chui and was never seen again. And two days later we found his oldest friend, Squeaks, poisoned on the rocks above George's camp. We were sure that Bugsy had been poisoned too, and never heard another bleep from his collar, dead or alive. I had thought I couldn't get any lower. Squeaks and I had been together for five years since she and Attila had come from France. Together we had proven that there was life after captivity for leopards and that they could be reintegrated. Unlike all the other leopards we released, we were able to watch her growing up because she had chosen to make Kampi ya Chui the centre of her territory but she had been completely independent and capable of surviving with no help from me. Nothing, though, could save her from the
shifta
who were destroying Kora.

The poaching now was countrywide, mechanized and organized, but no one would do anything about it. The only person
standing up and making a noise about the way the country was going was Richard Leakey, the rambunctious head of the East African Wildlife Society and head of the National Museums. He took great personal risks to rage against what was happening to his beloved nation but only the West was listening. And they weren't doing anything.

George was in hospital over Christmas while those of us in Kora tried to hold back the hordes of Somali grazers by our presence alone. The daily sound of camel bells tonking drove us mad. All the inselbergs had armed young men posted on them, watching our every move. Four days after George returned came the next insane twist in the saga. Ted Goss flew into camp with a letter saying that four sub-adult lions and a lioness were ready for collection at the Nairobi orphanage. When could George come and pick them up? George was eighty-two years old, and the reserve where he worked was overrun with domestic stock. Yet the same department that had closed him down four years earlier when Terence had been chewed up now wanted him to start up the lion project again. But this time alone. He was to be allowed one assistant who had to be an indigenous Kenyan chosen not by the WCMD based on an ability to work with wildlife but by Hola Council – on who knew what basis?

At the end of January, I headed down to Tanzania to have another look around. In a strange twist of fate, just as Kenya was destroying itself Tanzania was emerging from decades of isolation and doing exactly the opposite. They were desperate for help from wherever they could get it. Fred Lwezaula renewed his offer of the run of the parks and reserves. Engulfed in a haze of self-pity and rage, with alcohol taking an ever-stronger grip on me, I couldn't see past the slings and arrows to realize my outrageous good fortune. I was forty-four and had nothing – everything I had been working on for the last eighteen years had been destroyed – but now I was being offered a chance to drag
my life back from the brink of disaster. I'm ashamed to say that it took me a while to react. Nonetheless, by the time I left in the middle of February, I was pretty sure that Mkomazi was the place for me. The 1,350 square miles of national game reserve was completely undeveloped but had huge potential. It bordered Tsavo in my beloved Kenya and was somewhere I could submerge myself in hard work. I headed back to Kenya with the beginning of a spring in my step, keen to discuss the idea with George and beseech him to come with me.

When I arrived back in Kora there were three wounded Somalis at Kampi ya Chui. I managed to get them evacuated and taken to hospital by the Flying Doctors, but George was harder to move. Kora was not like it used to be. Many of the old staff had left and their replacements were not what I would have wished. Faithful Hamisi was still there, cooking up his foul brews, but most of the other staff were new. George was being looked after by a young girl called Doddie Edmonds, of whom he was very fond. Over the past few years she had come to Kora and nursed him through many of his asthma and allergy attacks, which were occurring with increasing frequency. I flew him to Nairobi to see Doc Meyerhold, but he insisted on going back to Kora before being medivaced out again in early March.

George was very concerned about leaving Doddie on her own and about his firearms licence. He had left his guns in camp, an offence that could have led to his licence being withdrawn. He asked Ted Goss to put some rangers into the camp to look after Doddie, then asked me to go up and sort everything out. First I went to the Firearms Bureau, explained that George was in hospital and got their permission to move his weapons to them in Nairobi. I picked up some air-crew friends – James Young, a senior captain on Boeing 747s, and Sally Trendell, a purser – and flew them up for the night. Thank God I did or I don't think I would have survived the visit.

Soon after we arrived at Kampi ya Simba we decided to take George's broken-down station wagon to Kampi ya Chui as my friends wanted to see where I had lived. The Land Rover had been playing up for a few weeks and Doddie had been unable to start it so I thought I'd see what I could do. I put my pistol in the central compartment and got the car started. Two rangers – whom I had known for years and who had been stationed at the camp – came out and tried to stop me, telling me the car was theirs. I thought they were joking and replied in a humorous fashion. One of their colleagues came out from behind George's hut and head-butted me in the face. Bare-chested, he stank of alcohol, which we later discovered had been stolen from George. He head-butted me again, punched and kicked me, while his friends put a few boots in as well. I was soon falling in and out of consciousness, amazed at and confused by what was going on. So surprised and stunned was I that I never put up any real defence.

They tied me up with a length of rope and threw me into the back of the pickup where I sat as they argued with James and Doddie, who insisted that they would follow wherever the rangers went. Eventually they drove me to Asako, followed by James and Doddie in the car. Poor Sally, a Surrey-born air stewardess who was just looking for a nice afternoon out in the bush, was left in camp with the very worst of George's staff – they had sat back and watched as I was beaten up. Tied up in a pickup on roads as rough as Kora's is no way to travel. You can't protect yourself as you're rolled against the wheel arches, tail-gate and the boots of your captors. As I lay there, I could hear the three rangers deciding that – much as they would like to – they couldn't kill me for trying to escape because there were too many witnesses. I was very relieved that James had stood up to them and followed me to Asako or they might have carried through their plan.